Sig Christenson: Afghan Army ready for prime time?

A U.S. military trainer passes a line of Afghan soldiers of the Afghan National Army during a training at an Afghan military barrack on the outskirts of Kabul.

We watched the Afghan National Army recruits on a sunny, cold morning as they ran through a series of training scenarios on a vast, muddy plain on the outskirts of Kabul, a tall mountain range at the far end of the camp.

These men started by doing a low crawl for about 20 yards or so so along a line of rocks that slowly descended. The job was to hug the earth deeper so your head, back and butt weren’t exposed to enemy fire as you snaked toward the next obstacle.

So far, so good, but moments later I heard an echo and sensed trouble.

“When we move, the weapon will be in both hands,” the instructor said, his words repeated in a pair of languages I didn’t understand but had heard a lot by that time.

The Afghan National Army is not an army of one, but two tongues. Complicating matters, only about one in every 10 of its soldiers can read. It is an army that is trying hard to represent every tribe from one end of the country to the other. That means you need translators and pictures to help recruits grasp the simplest concept, such as today’s lesson in low crawling and “bounding,” moving from one object to another while covering your buddy.

It struck me then that George Washington didn’t face difficulties like this, and it took years for him to create a cohesive, effective army. But things got even more interesting when Army Capt. Bill Spurlock told me that training here wasn’t as tough as it could be.

“We want these guys to stay,” explained Spurlock, a one-time Marine who lived in San Antonio from 1988-89. “It’s not like Marine boot camp, where we try to get you out.”

We’re going to write a good deal in the coming days about the Afghan National Army, or ANA, both in our paper and on this blog. It’s a complicated but crucial subject given that their performance is the key to our Afghan exit strategy, along with providing every part of the country with a better way of life, starting with basics like education and good jobs.

If Afghanistan’s army does well, we might just get out. If they don’t, we’re stuck.

Afghanistan is a hell of a place to fight a war. The Russians and British know something about that, and now it’s our turn. The Russians, in fact, tried doing all the things we are doing now, from training the security forces to providing help in rebuilding the country. They faced all the obstacles we do, among them abject poverty, endemic government corruption and gross indifference to the plight of the everyday Afghan barely getting by.

Oh, and they were fighting a committed insurgent force.

So there is a feeling of deja vu all over again. Fewer than half of all males in Afghanistan are literate. The number of literate women in the country is simply mind boggling, only 12 percent, according to the CIA World Fact Book. The number of soldiers in the “new” Afghan National Army who are unable to read is actually worse &mdash 11 percent.

There is a sense of urgency among our leaders at the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul. They’re pushing hard to have a force of 134,000 Afghan soldiers by mid-October, and have cut basic training from 10 to eight weeks to meet that goal.

A U.S. Army “mentor” to Afghan National Army soldiers stood next to me as we watched the recruits go through their paces. Master Sgt. Hakim Brown, 49, of St. Louis, Mo., told me that training here wasn’t much different from boot camp back in Fort Jackson, S.C.

The quality of the soldiers, though, was another matter.

“I guess Afghanistan has their standards of quality compared to us,” he said.